Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes | Hacker News Reader

Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

cubbyathome.com

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Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.

She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.

Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.

She's upset that the recipes are different

If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.

When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.

> When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice.

You might enjoy listening to this when you have 10 minutes:

"The Last Batch of Fudge" – by Michael Imber

https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge

The Moth's web site is really slow so here's another link to that story in the episode:

https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45

That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.

I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.

I have a professional cookbook like this

Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.

Indeed. When I entered "grandma's cookies" into the shared family instance is 'mealie' I was sure to include a copy of the "original" index card. (surely a copy) https://imgur.com/KMSuUhz

That card was has several fun comments and lots of history to my siblings who added to the crustiness of this card.

The original card I remember said to use lard or you can use margarine if you "haven't slaughtered a hog recently".

The recipe in mealie was modernized and tested more.

Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.

I really wish I had kept a note of what my parents called "neeps and tatties" soup - which was served with thick oatcakes from the local baker.

I do see recipes for it online but they look very different (spices? cream?).

> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions.

It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years.

It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :)

Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)

One of the most beautiful translations from English to HNish that I've ever read.

Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?

When people talk about the male loneliness epidemic I'm gonna pull this out as exhibit A of what's gone wrong.

> Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access!

I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.

LOL fork

I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.

Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.

Even regional differences in things.

If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.

Then Europe comes along and all the fancy European butters are made in 250g blocks, which are bigger than the 110g sticks but smaller than the package of 4 of them! This always confused my European friends when I'd say "oh I'll toss in a stick of butter" because they thought I was adding a quarter kilo of butter.

> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.

This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.

What's even easier than measuring with a kitchen scale is just throwing the entire can in and calling it good. That's often why these recipes used "boxes", "cans", etc as units of measurement in the first place. By converting to standard units you're increasing the amount of effort needed to actually make the dish. It might be more in keeping with the spirit of the recipe to just substitute similarly-sized cans or boxes, even if it's not quite the same taste. It depends on your priorities I suppose. (Though either way it's probably good to include units for the sake of clarity and reproducibility: e.g. "one 16 oz can" rather than "1 can".)

RE: finding what "1 can" or "1 bar" was, you may be able to scour archive.org for scans of old magazines and newspapers to see advertisements or product listings for the respective product? At least, that's one route I'd consider

I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.

> It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.

Here in the UK, I get irrationally annoyed by seeing recipes that use "U.S." measurements. A "cup" is mostly meaningless to me as I've got lots of different size cups and as you state, it's not a consistent way to measure most ingredients (I can understand it being used for liquids, but even so why not just use ml or weight). When it comes to measuring larger ingredients (e.g. apricots) then the dimensions of this platonic cup come into play and I have to start deriving the optimal (almost) sphere packing to figure out how many apricots to use.

Often the precise amount doesn't really matter though. Likely it was "one can" to begin with because that's just what was convenient and not because the recipe has been optimized to that size.

I guess it depends how much you care about perfectly reproducing the exact same dish. For personal cooking I usually don't - a bit of variance is not a negative thing.

I recently made an old family recipe for carrot cake, and the cream cheese frosting called for "a box" of confectioners sugar and "a package" of cream cheese.

After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...

This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.

Yes, except for this part:

> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale

This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.

I was enjoying reading that until I hit this line:

> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process

Whatever the potatoes were swimming in, it wasn't gluten.

By the way, the discussion of mashed potatoes reminds me of the excellent old "Smash" adverts on UK TV that featured martians/robots and a tagline of "For mash get Smash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBRCZLzn5pM

(Smash was surprisingly popular in the 1970s but then UK convenience food was abysmal back then)

The third footnote in that article, in its entirety:

> Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%.

Is this what passes for a reference now?

Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.

> Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.

What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.

Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.

> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.

I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons.

I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.

You'll need many sets as US cup sizes are different to UK cup sizes and other customary units.

I inherited my great-grandmas recipe book that calls for "50 pence [pfennig] worth of almonds".

I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.

It reminds me of one of Grandma Bicker's favorite mantras: "Measure twice, bake once!"

She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake.

Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!"

She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life.

At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect.

Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.

Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.

Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.

A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.

I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.

The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter

I tried my best to update several of my family recipes.

A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”.

This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

>This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

This site [1] has some interesting info:

[1886] "The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine to a pound, are laid by Leghorns, Cochins, Brahmins, Polands, Dorkings, Games, Sultans. Hamburgs lay about ten eggs to a pound. Thus there is a difference of three eggs in one pound weight. Hence it is claimed that in justice to the consumer eggs should be sold by weight." ---The Grocers' Hand-Book and Directory, Artemas Ward [Philadelphia Grocer Publishing:Philadelphia] 1886 (p. 67)

With similar figures given for 1911 as well. Which would suggest a normal egg in 1905 would be approximately 56g (1 pound/ 8 eggs = 0.125lb per egg).

[1] https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html

There are some baking recipes which measure the other ingredients relative to the weight of the eggs you have at hand. Like, "flour equal to twice your eggs weight"

> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.

Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...

Hero.

I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think.

Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe.

Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.

Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/

Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450

And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.

Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro...

If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.

When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.

Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?

There's a lot of comments on this, but nobody mentioned the similar job of maintaining and auditing an internal package mirror.

Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?!

Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?

Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...

I've seen a few places sell them. It's a specialty item and I suspect you need a specialty grocer or be some place where you can grow them. (e.g. in the tropics or semi-tropical spots, you can grow a variety of banana varieties that you can't really find in stores).

They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.

Gosh, you need to write a book. Totally serious. Someone needs to document it.

Uh... I would buy this cookbook... I suspect many others would as well...

What I hate most about shrinkflation is how shady it is. That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie makes me feel like I'm being played for a fool, and I do not like that.

With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is. Especially since these are usually mostly flour, some sort of yeast or another, and chocolate or sugar, feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.

> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.

It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.

The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.

That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.

There's a hypothesis that some part of the obesity epidemic stems from the widespread use of powerful emulsifiers in factory-produced goods. They attack the lining of the lower intestines (basically mucous) and wipe out chunks of our gut microbiota. I have no idea whether this is true, but once you realize that even "fresh bread from your local bakery" is often made using factory-produced Sodexo dry mixes, you see how easily this could affect everyone.

Why would you try to imitate a boxed cake mix?

They don't taste better than making a cake from scratch. It does take some practice baking to do so, but that is just an adulting skill like many others. Home baking doesn't need commercial chemistry. Commercial bakeries don't need to warn the kids not to jump in the house when the cake is baking. They are totally different scenarios.

So you're telling me it takes one update to the recipe of the boxed mix and you can never reproduce your old recipes? Sounds like one should avoid using ready made mixes altogether.

Ive made great cookies from 100 year old recipes. Why do would i want a carbon copy of a store cookie.

Ive never used or really seem cake mix in stores my whole life. Feels... American.

>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.

Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more.

Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea.

I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me...

But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....

I never really understood the point of a cake mix in the first place. Admittedly I'm not a grandmother and I don't bake cakes with regularity. But when I do bake them, I just do it from scratch. What's the advantage of a mix? It takes me five minutes to mix the dry ingredients and they're all inexpensive things that most cooks would already have on hand: flour, sugar, a leavener, cocoa powder, etc.

I'm thinking the same. But one of the other repliers pointed out specific ingredients and ratiod that are hard to reproduce, like gelifiers and specific leaveners.

My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo.

We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.

> That recessed middle section in cookie boxes so that they give me one less cookie

They aren't trying to fool you, even if it feels that way. They're trying to not retool their entire manufacturing and logistics workflows, which they would have to do to be able to change the outer dimensions of the package.

They could just sell the full package like they used to before if they don't want to change the packaging. The entire point of reducing the content is to mislead the consumer into not noticing a price increase.

Right. It's just a convenient side-effect that consumers are fooled.

> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is

Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?

Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food.

I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat.

My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes.

When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?

>if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is

There are a few interesting paragraphs on it in the book "On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen" (2004) by Harold McGee[0]. (p555)

>Modern American Cakes: Help from Modified Fats and Flours Beginning around 1910, several innovations in oil and flour processing led to major changes in American cakes. The first innovation made it possible to leaven cakes with much less work. The hydrogenation of liquid vegetable oils to make solid fats allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortenings with the ideal properties for incorporating air quickly at room temperature (p. 557). Modern cake shortenings also contain tiny bubbles of nitrogen that provide preformed gas cells for leavening, and emulsifiers that help stabilize the gas cells during mixing and baking, and disperse the fat in droplets that won’t deflate the gas cells.

>The second major innovation was the development of specialized cake flour, a soft, low-protein flour that is very finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out to cause the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily in high-sugar batters, and produce a stronger starch gel. It also causes fats to bind more readily to the starch granule surface, which may help disperse the fat phase more evenly. In combination with the new shortening and with double-acting baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop “high-ratio” packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%. The texture of the cakes they make is distinctively light and moist, fine and velvety.

>Thanks to these qualities and to the convenience of premeasured ingredients, packaged cake mixes were a great success: just 10 years after their major introduction following World War II, they accounted for half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became the American standard; and hydrogenated shortening and chlorinated flour became standard kitchen supplies for cakes made “from scratch.”

>The Disadvantages of Modified Fats and Flours Hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and chlorinated flour are very useful, but have drawbacks that lead some bakers to avoid them. Hydrogenated shortening does not have the flavor that butter does, and has the more serious disadvantage of containing high levels of trans fatty acids (10-35% compared to butter’s 3-4%; see p. 38). Chlorinated flour has a distinctive taste that some bakers dislike (others find that it enhances cake aroma). And the chlorine ends up in fat-like flour molecules that accumulate in animal bodies. There’s no evidence that this accumulation is harmful, but the European Union and the United Kingdom consider the safety of chlorinated flour unproven, and forbid its use. The U.S. FDA and the World Health Organization consider chlorinated flour a safe ingredient for human consumption.

>Manufacturers are addressing some of these problems and uncertainties. For example, the effects of flour chlorination can be approximated by heat treatment, and vegetable oils can be hardened without the production of trans fatty acids. So it’s likely that cooks will eventually be able to make high-ratio cakes with less questionable ingredients.

[0] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4110479W/On_food_and_cooking...

Note that today, one can easily find cake flour that isn't chemically bleached. Also, shortening manufacturers have gone to fully-hydrogenated oils, rather than partially hydrogenated, to reduce the amount of trans-fats. But some are still using palm oil, so it's not a total win.

If you still buy it, you are being played for a fool. I don’t buy shady products like this.

> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays.

> a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil

I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie recipe was just Nestle Tollhouse.

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583536/

Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.

Cake mixes aren't just the ingredients in a convenient package. They're a complicated ingredient that produces different results than mixing from scratch.

Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:

https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec

Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.

This sounds like the argument people make against Hawaiian food. Why use Spam! You can eat real food you know!

Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.

As an Asian I understood this as the same as when I buy curry cubes from the store. It would definitely mess up my day if the size of a bouillon cube changed even though I know I could make my own broth.

Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.

If you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.

Homemade cake mixes rarely win blind taste tests against box mix. I baked two cakes with and without glycerol monostearate—it really does make a difference.

I think people know you can purchase baking ingredients.

There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.

There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.

I'm glad it's not just anecdotal. I had an American colleague whose husband praised her amazing guacamole recipe. The recipe turned out to be a jar of guacamole and a jar of salsa mixed together. I may have forgotten the details but a jar of guacamole was certainly listed as an ingredient. I thought it was a joke!

I bet you couldn't consistently make a cake even half as good as a box mix for even triple it's cost.

People who don't bake often then baking is just throwing some stuff together and heating it up. It's very hard to get consistent results! It's literally an exact science. Did you weigh all the ingredients exactly? Did your mix and sift them evenly? Is your leavening agent fresh? Did you account for the humidity in your area and kitchen? Does your oven actually heat at the temperature it says? Does it heat evenly inside? Maybe you can pull off a good cake once or twice, but can you do it again, in a different kitchen? What about a smaller cake or bigger one? Box mixes take as many variables out of the equation as possible. They are very forgiving and delicious. There is no shame in using one for the home.

> (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need)

That stuff isn't just "preservatives" or whatever, it's the big difference in texture and flavor. I highly recommend actually trying a box-mix cake and a made-from-scratch mix side-by-side. It's incredible how different it is, especially with how little actual technique goes into the box-mix.

https://satwcomic.com/family-time

On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.

Depending where you are, low (and high) protein flour can be hard to find at the supermarket.

>Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird

Just think of it as the Arduino Nano/ESP32 module of baking.

> People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.

Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.

The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs.

(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)

Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.

Eggs can be considered continuous with a large enough volume of them.

You're cake is going to turn out fine with a bit more or less egg in it. Just adjust other liquids a bit to compensate.

Many recipes call for an egg and a white (or yolk) since it better approximates that scaling. Or if you double it, it becomes 3 eggs instead

What about liquid egg whites/yolks? Aside from the shelf life this always seemed like a key selling point to me.

You can just buy small eggs, and use them for fractional eggs.

Grocery stores sell different sizes of eggs over here.

Sure you can. Scramble them a bit and weigh them.

I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...

From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.

My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)

Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.

I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.

The tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.

IIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.)

(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)

Two main mistakes that people make: 1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in. 2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.

My brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it.

The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...

Even if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!

Well I mean weight vs volume, actual oven temp, full fat vs skim, salted or unsalted. There's a lot of little variables even "following" a recipe.

Why are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making.

As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.

If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.

In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.

I can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common.

Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.

> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and

> ⅓ cup neutral oil — no longer works now that the box is a full 5 ounces smaller

> than its original 18.25-ounce size ... “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,

> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.

Shrinkflation is irritating but I dunno if I'd be pushing the "old family recipe" angle if it's just adding two eggs and some oil to a packet of pre-mixed powder

It sounds like she has been claiming that the recipe that is literally printed on the side of the box has actually been "her" recipe for all these years.

Wait until you see the family recipes for limoncello.

I cut the sugar in grandma's limoncello by 30% and still end up with rocket fuel syrup which my friends think will cause sleep problems and diabeetus

That's one where I'm ok with people not having to do all the steps: I can't even imagine a grandpa try to distill alcohol in their basement or something.

Honestly I don't mind if people don't make everything themselves as there's always going to be a line where you go "well I'm not doing that" (you're probably not milling your own flour, growing your own wheat, milking your own cows, raising your own chickens etc...).

I just think they've tried to reach a bit far for a human interest angle - it's already annoying that customers are getting shafted, that's important! We don't need to spin a yarn about little Granny Scroggins cakes disappearing from the local church fair.

Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.

So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.

This is a link to the last time I talked about this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745

and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539

EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:

    3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
    2 eggs
    ¼c. water
    ⅓c. vegetable oil
    and the included packet of Hershey's syrup

The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)

As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.

Ok so this is the cake pan thread.

They can shrink the amount of mix in a box but the hard limit of shrinking is the standard set of pans that everyone has. There are also bundt and springform pans in addition to the rectangulars. So if they shrink the amount in the box, as the original article mentions, they have to keep changing the recipe to increase the air and the rise so it still fits the same pans -- maybe badly. Or they just abandon the larger pans and don't offer instructions for them and it's up to the baker to buy multiple boxes and do the math?

I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.

But they just had to blow their whole leg off - who cares that down the line none of the recipes won't work and will result in inedible cakes? Look, we saved some cents by skimping on the raw ingredients! Why care about the long term when the next quarter is the only thing that we can see?

> I have no idea what they were thinking with that. Their product relied on it having attained the status of being a common unit. They have many recipes calling for 1 box of their product, it's the perfect way to have your customers promote your product or even to lock them into your brand, with the same consistent unit size coming with every variant of your cake mix.

Yes but how do you use that to make the line go up enough to justify a pay rise for yourself.

I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.

Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.

I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.

What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.

And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).

Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.

(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)

You assume the average consumer is paying any attention to the net weight of their purchases.

Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.

Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.

(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)

The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.

Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.

Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.

Sure, and ads are a nice thing on websites.

At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.

Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.

Party size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.

I've found the only way to buy potato chips economically is through Costco or Sam's Club. That said, frying them yourself saves money and is going to be more healthy.

In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.

It's better than nothing but not always enough. For example it doesn't help with products made up of different ingredients where some are more valuable than others and companies replace e.g. meat with more filler.

Also not all countries require the per unit price to be as large as the total price so you still need to make an active effort to accurately compare different items.

If you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.

Cooking in larger batches has been my solution to the current trends in grocery pricing. It also helps to smooth out variability in recipes. Small batches are impacted much more severely. For example, if a recipe calls for 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients. If you scale this to a dozen eggs, you could simply forget 2 of them and the difference would likely be undetectable.

I used to buy things like taco shells in boxes of a dozen or so. Would make enough marinara for 8 pasta bowls. Today, I will buy hundreds of corn tortillas from the bakery, a big bag of pork fat trimmings from the butcher, and then I'll run my own lard and taco shell factory for a day. I'll make 4 dozen cookie balls at a time. I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.

The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning. It's not that it even necessarily takes more time to do things this way. Batching effects are unreasonably effective in all domains. Throw the magic of the freezer on top and it gets even more interesting from an economics standpoint.

> 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients.

I've always had the habit of weighing the eggs I use and adjusting the rest of the recipe for baking. Some recipes also includes weight of eggs in grams for exactly that reason. (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.

> The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning

It's also at the cost of taste. A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)

> (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.

How did you arrive at those numbers? I (an American) have always understood one "standard large egg" to be 50g.

> A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)

How you reheat the food makes a huge difference. Freezer => microwave is noob tier. What you want is something like: freezer => thaw 24-48h in fridge => stir fry for 5 minutes. Make some fresh pasta each time. Start preheating the oven right before your 1130 meeting starts. This stuff doesn't take that long. Adding a bit of extra ceremony on the backside can make a huge difference in the final result.

> Ive scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.

Care to share this recipe? Sounds wild.

Just take your current favorite recipe and make more breading for the coating. That doesn't sound like there's much to actually do there.

> I've scaled my chicken fried rice recipe to implicate 16 entire chickens.

Is this satire? Do you do your cooking in an industrial cafeteria kitchen? Do you have a family of 20 people?

Reads to me like he's doing an extreme version of the meal prep trend.

For those wondering not from the US: it's because of world war 2. An entire generation of kids who grew up during WWII rationing, where pre-packaged mixes were a lot easier to find than straight sugar and a lot more stable and recipes almost always are based on what you can have on hand. Not to mention boxed cake mixes are absolute marvels of chemistry, like there really it a big difference over just self-rising flour.

A story I heard: the boxes of cake mix initially didn’t require eggs. Apparently housewives at the time hated them, because it made them feel sort of worthless, so the recipe was re-engineered to require a minimal amount of fresh ingredients; then they were a huge hit.

[edit] oh, this story is repeated in a Youtube vid someone else here posted: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec?feature=shared

I have a pet theory that frozen microwave dinner instructions work the same way.

They always seem to turn out the same no matter how you cook them, yet the back of the box insists that you need to poke several holes in the plastic and stir it halfway through and let it cool for several minutes.

I'm convinced that they only add those steps to make people feel less guilty about heating up premade meals.

Yes, this is indeed strange for me, and, I would guess, most people (people not from the US). The only reason I even knew cake mixes exist is because a former Au Pair told me about it, years ago. Apparently her host family was shocked when said Au Pair made cake the "normal" way, i.e. with eggs, flour, sugar etc.

Baking cakes from scratch is easy. Even I could make an apple cake very quickly with a recipe (I quickly found one online, but I could as well just have used the recipe book from the bookshelf), and I had a nice cake ready shortly after, never having made an apple cake before. My wife said "I don't have the time, you do it". And I did.

Mix? Full of additives and whatnot, I bet. I won't eat that.

And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country.

You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.

Self raising flour was invented by a British baker, Henry Jones, in an attempt to make better bread for sailors. We still have it in the UK and I never trust it, always adding baking powder anyway to cakes. We have plain flour for pastry and sauces and then bread flour (higher gluten) for bread. I always have three flours in my cupboard.

Self-raising flour is a British invention. We're also responsible for the Chorleywood bread process and probably other abominations too.

i grew up in the U.S. and didn’t realize this fact. Thank you for explaining it, this makes so much more sense now!

I feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.

Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.

The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.

I've made loads and it is trivial. You literally just follow the recipe.

Bread is a lot more difficult due to kneeding and shaping which are skills that must be honed.

Cakes, on the other hand, are just mixing and pouring which any idiot can do. The only real variable is the flour so some recipes might work better in your region than others, but cakes are still much more forgiving than bread (flour is more than half of bread by weight, but often less than a third of a cake).

Baking a cake IS easy. Try it out XD

Making cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.

I have made many cakes which is how I know that yes, a basic cake is pretty trivial.

Such a strange comment. Cakes are old as time. I make a few per year from scratch and they come out great. The dry ingredients are indeed, mainly flour, sugar and leavener. Any skill required is generally in your baking technique and not in mixing those things.

I wish they would just increase the price. The shrinking can sizes have messed quite a few of my recipes.

It's deceptive and people know something is off. I personally don't have the energy to figure out what's up and don't want 3/4 of a can of something sitting in the fridge.

My response is to just stop making broken recipes which means I stop buying those products entirely as they have lost their value and my trust.

This does seem like a very US-centric problem. None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging, and generally don't use premixed ingredients. It's very strange.

Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am Midwestern, so maybe not :)

I lived all over the US when I was young. If I had to pick a part of the US that I most strongly identify with that kind of cuisine, it would be the Midwest, no contest. Other parts of the US used it to varying extents but in the Midwest it was a core part of the cuisine. They practically reveled in it.

Some of the casseroles constructed that way from those days were legit delicious but I haven’t seen or heard of them since the prior millennium. I’m not even sure if some of the prefab ingredients are still available. I’d eat some of those again in a heartbeat. You don’t see it on the coasts anymore but the tradition still seems to exist in flyover areas.

NB: I just googled some of these things and the recipes appear to exist online, I just don’t know where to buy some of the canned ingredients.

No, he didn’t. What he was referring to was combining finished products to create new dishes. Not using pre mix products.

In the '90s I remember that people in Germany would request I bring brownie mix when I visited; apparently US brownie mixes were superior to anything available domestically.

That makes sense since it's an American dessert. Germany seemingly only produces the worst possible version of American bread and butter popcorn.

I was thinking that and feeling rather proud of being European where we rarely use pre-mix (I've seen some in supermarkets but don't know anyone who uses them).

Then I realized that I typically buy my puff pre-made (made with butter) because it's good enough and it's hard to make at home... Most people I know do the same. Now granted, making puff pastry is quite a bit more involved than mixing ingredients like a pre-mix cookie recipe but still...

Puff pastry is also usually not the main part of whatever you're making but rather just something to hold it together. I see it more as buying pasta to go along my self-made stew - sure I could make it myself but for most dishes I wouldn't notice the difference. The cake mix is much more defining of the taste of the resulting cake so I'd want to have a say as to what goes into it instead of just using someone else's design.

It usually doesn't matter. But I can think of a few recipes that have been impacted which usually rely on canned goods. They'll call for something like a "15oz (425g) can of diced tomatoes" and shrinkflation has turned those into 12.5oz cans (350g). You can't even buy a 15oz can anymore which is a bit frustrating.

I can get a spice mix for tacos/burritos here in Denmark. The spice package assumes 500g of ground beef, which no longer comes in 500g packaging, but only 400g. Not a massive issue, the food is just a bit more spicy.

> None of the recipes I was brought up on base their quantities on third party packaging

I mean, they were probably all made using convenient measurements that were converted to whatever units you use after the fact.

Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.

Shrinkflation means that those mixes rely on more sugar or corn syrup solids. Maybe the idea is to keep both serving size and nutrition facts consistent while dropping 3 oz off the box.

Ok, this is weird right? '“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.'

Why pass some boxed commercial mix through your family? Maybe I have too much Italian in me (I'm not Italian, just love their mindset when it comes to cooking) but that's like passing some cheap plastic kitchen utensil down the family, instead of your cast iron skillet.

Just learn to bake properly based on flour, milk, sugar and eggs. Even my 9 year old makes muffins this way.

I still don't understand why people buy "pancake mix" for example, pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs. That's about 1/3rd the price of a mix.

For Judith it’s about the nostalgia of being a girl and having her mother make these cookies with this method. Judith’s mom was likely over-worked and buying a box was a timesaver. Who cares if it’s not “properly” made?

Ok yeah I get that. It's certainly a shame for Judith.

But companies come and go. They change recipes all the time. They do research to make everything as cheap as possible, you may never know it but I knew someone working at Unilever and the Mars bar for example constantly evolves, and let me tell you it's not because they want to give you the best Mars bar, it's just "we found a cheaper supplier for X" or "If we replace X by Y we save Z, and you don't really taste it". I like our Dutch tomatoes: Big, deep red and absolutly tasteless. Now they sell "taste tomatoes", I'm not kidding, they're much nicer. Last much longer on a shelve as well.

Many, many products have changed and disappeared over the decades. I don't see anything worth reporting in the piece, except for "putting attention on shrinkflation". Which is fine of course, but Judith should know better, we all should.

Judith should take this as a generational learning opportunity to provide her children and grandchildren with memories that don't depend on a corporation not altering their products.

Do you mill your own flour? Or do you just use some boxes commercial mix like a filthy commoner?

I don't mill my flour of course, I do get it at a mill which does, because I bake a lot of bread and 5 kg bags are cheaper.

That said, if you take my pancake example, you literally replace the flour with more expensive pancake mix. Ok, fine, in some mizes there are dried eggs and milk protein or something, and you just need water. But you could even make pancakes with water instead of milk and they're fine.

With cookies it's similar, most baking is just different amounts of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, milk/water. Maybe some vanilla sugar here and there. It's really not that hard. Hey, and now you can start to experiment with banana and almond flour, and make it a bit less unhealthy/more nutritious. Or make pancakes with oats and banana, also nice and a lot more fiber. Treat yourself to a nice kitchen machine with the money you save and become much faster as well.

Learning some basic, proper cooking and baking should just be part of raising kids imo.

I know it sounds snobbish, but it's really not rocket science. Imo we are being scammed by all these companies selling products that are just as much effort, but more expensive and less healthy (usually more additives). They just prey on our lack of knowledge with their recipes on the packaging and their products conveniently put at eye-height, whereas basic stuff like flour is always at the lower shelves.

The other weird thing here is passing that recipe along at all. People are impressed with boxed mixes? It’s just weird to me.

It doesn’t even make sense. Buying the individual ingredients is more versatile. You spend less money, and have extra eggs, flour, etc left over that can be used for other recipes. And then it actually feels more homemade too.

Saving 20 seconds (measuring and prepping 3 ingredients for a “mix”) in order to end up with less tasty food is illogical.

*edit* ok never mind there is some reason to the madness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45246000

Mill my own flour? I'd call that the "Carl Sagan fallacy" for the lack of a better name. We don't have to "[first] invent the universe from scratch to make apple pie". Even if that is what he literally said.

You have been able to buy milled flour for thousands of years, and will probably be able to for as long as there is civilization.

Betty Crocker would be lucky to survive another hundred years.

> pancakes are 250 gr flour, 500 ml of milk and 2 eggs.

If you're too poor to afford an appropriate amount of eggs maybe.

Yeah I can understand shrinkflation style adjustments but they're starting to hit inflection points like this.

Amazon just adjusted the Amazon Grocery minimums +25%...and now it just doesn't work anymore for a 1 person household. It's not that I can't afford it...it's just too much stuff in one go. Forces shifting buying patterns from fresh to frozen & shelf stable junk. I'm not doing +25% bigger cart sizes for a shit diet Amazon

Original source: https://www.thekitchn.com/grandmas-arent-buying-boxed-cake-m...

I’ve never seen the appeal of using a pre-made mix for pastry. We already eat too much processed food in our daily lives, and pastry, something that should be a rare pleasure, is worth taking the time to make properly.

You don’t need all that chemistry and weird ingredients when good products are enough for even the most prestigious chefs.

I’m really surprised at the numerous comments here admonishing the use of box mix. For most Americans, we don’t do enough baking to warrant having flour and leaveners on hand. It’s just cheaper and more efficient to buy the box mix under $2 and use it when you need it. Besides, the end result for the average person is going to be better than anything they try to scratch make.

> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother.

Passing down a box mixture as a "recipe" seems really alien to me in the UK. Measuring flour, sugar and spice isn't rocket surgery.

What other branded products do you guys depend on for basic cooking? Campbell's soup had a moment here postwar.

I’ll bring up this story the next time a client is arguing for a complete vendor buy-in.

Replacing agnostic YAML with vendored tools means replacing parts of the family recipe with Betty Crocker.

I don't know about the US but where I live, cake mixes contain substandard ingredients and are sold at a premium compared to making it with the right stuff.

And mixing something together like a brownie doesn't take more than 20 minutes from start until it's in the oven. It's not even a time saver.

If the box mix stops working then people will stop buying it and throw the recipes away, leading to a lasting reduction sales.

But… the executive who juiced the KPIs and got his bonus will be a long gone.

I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.

Shiver mi' timbers Terence; it's been a hard day and only Kraft Dinner can calm my nerves.

>Judith isn’t the only one. She says that her other (grandma) friends are feeling the changes, too, and they’re not happy about it. Betty Crocker has empowered home cooks to make delicious desserts for over a century now.

>*So it’s no surprise just how many cherished family recipes — involving that once familiar box of cake mix* — have been passed down from generation to generation.

This can't be serious

Family recipes involving cake mix? Is north america for real?

Probably a good place to post a 400 year old recipe for pancakes. I've made them, they are very good. Note that what is considered a "pancake" has changed over the years and changes with location.

https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...

I'm always amazed that techniques like shrinkflation work (or I presume they work, because if they didn't I assume no one would be doing it!). Do the manufacturers just think that consumers won't eventually notice the reduced amount of product, leading to only short-term gains?

Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.

I assume it creates an opportunity for the old formula to arrive at a premium price and packaging.

This definitely seems like a case where continuing to increase the price makes more sense than shrinking the box.

Maybe we’ll see a reversal if sales actually go down?

If you've been around the last shrinkflation block, you know what'll happen.

Things will keep shrinking and slowly they'll stop calling it "family" size. After a year or 2, they'll introduce a new "extra large" size of the product which is actually just the old size or old large size.

Inflation always happens, and shrinkflation is how businesses deal with that.

[flagged]

Please don't use HN for ideological battle. This is clearly against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.

While that is true, no one needs betty crocker food to survive. There is plenty of food in the grocery store that is basically not essential at all and exist because of price and value proposition, and this is the stuff people are turning away from now that the price doesn’t support the value. Even among stuff like cuts of meat, people are probably shifting to cheaper cuts and bulk deals.

Sales of betty crocker mix can go down.

Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.

Um. I'm not sure anyone needs Betty crocker cake or cookies.

You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.

Maybe people will start doing that?

Clif bars recently went from 6 bars per box to 5. They write the 5 on the box as if it is something improved, not reduced.

Everyone talks about the cake mix and its quality, but I'm much more amazed that for all the "for Americans 500 years is a lot" jokes I find myself much more anecdotal things that seem to be more easily preserved on a time span of 50 to 200 years, for example being able to even buy the same cake mix as just 50 years ago.

Maybe it's all going back to World War II and stuff here in Germany changing too much, but from all the stories from my parents and their childhood after the war, I don't see a lot of this. (Not saying it's good or bad, I have some recipes but they're all in the "100g of flour" style). Or Genealogy. I didn't put in a huge amount of effort but my experience is that tracking your ancestors for more than a couple generations is not as popular in my working class circles.

Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too.

The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a comparatively expensive ingredient.

Who else has family recipes with "can of X"? that can of soup from 50 years ago is not the same as today for the worse. I know one of my parents recipes will be gone forever if the creamed corn they use is discontinued or changes to be like every other brand.

The “healthy request” or “low sodium” cans will have potassium chloride and sugar added, compared to the conventional.

I have baking recipes from my great-grandmother (circa 1890) that direct the baker to use "a medium fire". They were later annotated in my grandmother's handwriting with temperatures (in Fahrenheit).

When I actually started cooking I was shocked at how simple a lot of these box ingredients actually are.

They somehow tricked a whole generation into buying "pancake mix" which is just flour, sugar, baking soda and salt!

Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.

Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.

Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.

Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.

How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?

The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.

My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.

I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.

The no-frills commodity mixes often seem quite cheap so it’s possible the price was still pretty fair.

I think the shrinkflation phenomenon says a great deal about capitalism, because it gives the lie to the argument that 'we've got to raise prices because our inputs have become more expensive.' With shrinkflation, corporations have to spend significant amounts of money to redesign their packaging, recertify it as safe, and change their production lines and packaging logistics to accommodate the smaller bottles/cartons/boxes. You can't just keep using what you have and fill it only 80% full, as customers won't stand for it; it'd be simpler to just raise prices, but then people might look at your product and decide that their demand is elastic enough to switch to a substitute or give up using it altogether. Shrinking the packaging while keeping the price the same costs money up front, on what is essentially an effort to deceive the consumer.

Funny enough, in my family we never used boxed mix. My grandmother did everything using a measuring cup and raw ingredients. My mother thought boxed mixes were full of chemicals and not as natural as using individual ingredients.

Though Betty Crocker also made cook books that did not rely on boxes. A recipe my parents used to make crepes came from a BC cook book. Another one was the Nestle tollhouse cookies that was listed on their bag of chocolate chips.

The level of food moral superiority by people here is off the charts.

Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article.

Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.

This is one of the reasons why my recipes standardize on ingredients you can source from any grocery store, and not on specific brand items. I will include it in the recipe as a shortcut, but then show the substitution methods if such an item is unavailable or unreliable.

Yeah but did you see the yacht it bought?

My contribution: Making cookies out of chocolate cake mix is so good that I stopped doing it. I couldn't say no to them. I used Dolly Parton cake mix and substituted 1/2 the neutral oil with unsalted butter. That and sweet Chex mix are diet destroyers.

General Mills should release "Recipe Perfect" (old size) box in a brilliant ad campaign. They can still sell the smaller boxes with the name "Right Size" for the family - "Perfect portions for today's families"

I don't get the point of cake mixes. How hard is it to measure and mix a couple of dry ingredients to make whatever you want instead of buying pre-made mixes for every different type of cake/bread/etc.

>>Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil

I can't cook at all, but not sure you can call using a packet mix a "recipe". If that counts, please ask me for my recipe for beans on toast.

It feels really weird that people can get so attached to – and dependent on – boxed mixes. It's not that hard to bake really great cookies from scratch, and then they're actually home-made.

We’re a technical crowd here, we understand inflation, and we can do math. I suspect most of us here are in a position to change the world, make things better, healthier, safer, faster. It is difficult for me to empathize with “I just can’t out of principle” when the change is so minimal. How can we ever fix big problems if people can’t adapt to such small ones? She didn’t have to deal with inflation for the last 30 years, now she is having to deal with some. To me, the bigger change would be for people to have to go without her cookies! I hope those of us growing up in this faster changing world can remember in our later years that change is necessary.

So does the mix now call for slightly smaller eggs?

Or has the mix changed to still work with the same number of eggs?

If the former, that is stupid. If the latter, then the flavour/consistency is bound to change.

Hopefully this'll be the end of this boxed mixes. You need to add a few ingredients to them anyway. Just add a few more and feel like a sourcerer. Your cakes will glow octarine.

A Sauceror? You can also make your own spaghetti and become a Pastamancer...

If you make everything from scratch you'll save so much money that you'll make out like a Disco Bandit?

Not quite the same, but I am reminded of the disturbance in the force when Nabisco discontinued the chocolate wafer cookies that everyone used for cheesecake crusts.

This feels like when leadership has us push through a "minor change" to a service. And it causes alot of, lets say interesting, bugs downstream

And thats why i hate all recipes with measuring "units" like : pinch, spoon, dash etc....

Can i tell you about our lord and saviour the have metric system? :)

I honestly don't mind things likes pinch and dash as they are clear to be left mainly to the taste of cook.

I mind slightly more teaspoons and tablespoons but I also can usually see them as "add at least a bit, up to you".

The worst offenders are cups, as they often measure large quantities, which often do make or break a recipe. Even just the way you use that cup to collect the ingredients changes the resulting quantity.

On the other hand, whenever the amounts don't matter but you want to get there fast and then you know you will adjust it yourself, cups are surprisingly nice. It gets you there 90% and then you adjust for consistency or taste.

Of course, using cups for liquids is generally fine if you don't want super precision, it's the dried ingredients which must have weight tied to them.

In US recipes a cup doesn't mean whatever literal cup you have in you cupboard, it means 237ml. If you cook a lot it pays to have measuring cups of the appropriate size.

Assuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be:

- 2 boxes cake mix

- 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs)

- 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c)

YMMV

I think you need 371 boxes of cake mix to skip rounding errors. Granny wants consistency.

The factory must grow.

Ostensibly not since she didn’t bother changing the recipe when the box shrank to ~15oz.

This is a case study in why it’s so important to understand how your users actually use your product.

>“It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith,

I'd be very upset too if my grandma was using a cake mix for cooking

There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.

The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.

A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.

For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.

As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.

Why?

The most infuriating case of shrinkflation I've encontered yet is abot the "Oreo" style cookies, that were used to be sold on packages where each cookie was stacked on top of another, "laying flat". Over time, rhe packages started getting lighter, the cookies itself started getring smaller etc. Then, a couple years ago, those packages started having the cookies "side by side", instead of laying one on top of the other... I refuse to buy any brand that uses these types of shenanigans. Fuck shrinkflation.

Shrinkflation breaks userspace

bit rot, but with recipes

reminds me of my 10+ year old nodejs project i fired up last week

So....just rot then?

more like a funny sort of dependency drift

Not strictly related, but the one that really grinds my gears is Hamburger Helper. They discontinued their "Twin Pack" that made a double batch with 2 lb of hamburger, and replaced it with "Value Size 60% more!" So now we're all supposed to buy 1.6 lb of hamburger so we can use your crappy inconvenient product? How about no.

I love how capita, er, enshittification is taking hold in every fucking god damn last corner of our puny lives. I know I'm stretching enshittification a bit here, but it's the same basic premise at it's heart. Exploit your captive, often naive/ignorant audience. It's so, so exhausting.

Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.

Not always. Canned tuna is my favorite. They shrunk the 6oz can to 5 over a decade or so. At one point I laughed at a 5 3/16 oz can.

Huh?

Don't feed the idiological troll.

I hope Duncan Hines is reading this.

> There’s a problem with boxed mixes, and it’s impacting grandmas’ most beloved recipes

It's not their recipes if it's from a box.

If only there wasn't a universal unchanging unit of measure that did not depend on third parties and was used across the world.

> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil

> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother

Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.

It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately.

The answer is probably to make your own "box mix" by doing a 10x batch at once, mixing it all up really good, and then storing of them in the freezer until needed. But I've never tried that, so it might have problems that I don't foresee.

It's a lot easier to make from a box.

> There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch"

Growing up is figuring out there are no monsters under your bed but that you're sharing the planet with them

> It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch".

I don't buy it. A basic cake recipe is simple measuring (with enough tolerance that anyone can do it), mixing and pouring. No special skills required.

> Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard.

Ok, for sufficiently small values of "not quite the same", but so what? There's going to be more significant differences in your eating experience than the cake having a tiny bit more sugar or whatever. And companies change their mix all the time too.

Why would you buy overpriced cake mix in the first place? Buy flour, sugar, cocoa and sodium bicarbonate and... that's it?

Oh wait you probably have all of them already.

Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).

* 270g flour: 65¢

* 6g baking powder: 10¢

* 3g baking soda: 1¢

* 4.5g salt: 1¢

* 64g cocoa: $1.15

* 354g sugar: 90¢

* 113g butter: $1.42

We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.

Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.

So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.

[1]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chocolate-cake-reci... [2]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...

The 15oz (pre-shrinkflation) Betty Crocker mix weighs 432g, 2/3 the weight of your recipe's flour and sugar alone, so your recipe is for a much larger cake.

Wal-Mart's own brand flour is about (Canadian) $C0.15/kg if buying 2.5kg, cake & pastry flour more like 24 cents/kg. Granulated Sugar is C$0.15/kg. I'm not sure where you're buying flour & sugar.

Your most expensive ingredient is butter but you could have easily chosen a recipe without butter. I reckon the cake with butter will be much better than BC's version though.

Other advantages of baking with a recipe are being able to scale the recipe up or down as needed, and always having the ingredients for many different recipes on hand without having to buy a vanilla cake mix, a brownie mix, a pancake mix, a waffle mix etc.

The main advantage of a recipe is tweakability. I find most commercial cakes far too sweet, and when I bake from a recipe I can find the point to which I can reduce the sugar without it becoming too bland.

I don't know whether they're harmful but I'm quite happy to cook a cake without Propylene glycol, Xanthan gum, cellulose gum, sodium stearoyl lactylate, monoglycerides, and monoesters of fatty acids

I've always been baffled by the popularity of pre-made recipe boxes. Maybe useful if I was camping or something, but not when I have access to an actual kitchen.

According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)

So, cake flour?

Because you live in a small apartment and don't have storage space for a thing of flour, a thing of sugar, cocoa you might use twice a year?

Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?

Because you value convenience?

Honestly, what a silly take. The world thrives on convenience products.

> Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?

Box mixes are a very US thing. I promise you that kids still get to bake in other countries. Having done both it is my opinion that messing with the raw ingredients is more fun.

Assembling your own cake mix is pretty easy if you really wanted to. Stick it in the freezer for whenever. However the prepackaged stuff is still likely to taste better because it uses industrial ingredients that will simply taste better.

A quick look at the first Betty Crocker mix I found on Safeway's site showed: corn syrup, xantham gum, and cellulose. Those will all contribute to the final texture and moistness.

Basic cake recipes are simple enough for even younger children to do and are a great way to teach basic cooking skills.

And if you only use flour and sugar twice a year then there's probably other things you would be better off making yourself.

I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.

He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.

The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!

Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.

I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.

My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.

But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.

SNAP like implies some poverty. They are likely not representative. Though it is still shocking.

i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. Even hight end resteraunts are obviously reheating the same industrial froozen meals.

The people relying on cake mid probably don’t have any of that in their pantry.

Judith’s recipe passed down by her grandmother was this: follow the instructions on the box. Lol wtf? I guess some grandmas don’t really know how to bake.

That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.

Sure but then I'm sure people aren't boasting about their grandpa's tradition furniture build process that involves following instructions from ikea

I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)

Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.

Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.

What a Betty Crocker of Enshitification.

Speaking of cookie recipes, have you tried the Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe?

Bejabbers it's fine. Pecan flour. Walnuts. 2 kinds of chocolate...

Costs $50 to do a batch tho.

Is every batch $50, or is some of the cost from stocking up on some uncommon ingredients?

Which recipe are you following? I found a few, including one on the Neiman Marcus website, but none had pecan flour and only one had walnuts.

The one from email spam circa 2003?

Shrinkflation and private equity really do ruin everything!

Would Americans consider learning to bake instead?

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